


another turn of the wheel

by bissonomy (Macdicilla)



Category: The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
Genre: Other, Survival, Travel, Unplanned Pregnancy, baby au, everyone lives but it's not really easier, he/him gethenians
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-29
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:35:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,272
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27265090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Macdicilla/pseuds/bissonomy
Summary: The wheel turns slightly differently, and little alterations snowball into a very different story.Not achieving mindspeech leaves Genly and Estraven free to prove another, far less subtle point, which has implications for both of them. Thessicher’s conscience wins out over cowardice. Even he wouldn’t call the royal guards on someone who’s pregnant.
Relationships: Genly Ai/Therem Harth rem ir Estraven
Comments: 28
Kudos: 31





	1. Gobrin Ice - Genly's narration

I tried mindspeech with Estraven six or eight times in the month of Thanern. No luck. I could feel his mind present and eager, but my thoughts could not reach it. After a while, he gave up.

“I am deaf as a rock, dumb as a log,” he said one night in frustration.

His frustration was partly due to the temperature of the tent. The chabe stove, on my side of the tent, was turned to eight out of thirteen; rather cozy for me, too hot for him. It had been on ten previously, but I had turned it down.

He was still in kemmer, and had been abstaining to that point, but it was the last day of kemmer. He assured me that the intensity tapered off towards the end. Still, he was too hot, and his undershirt was sticking to his skin as he tried to wriggle out of it.

“We could play Go again,” I suggested.

“No,” he grumbled, cursing at his undershirt.

He asked me, then, to give him a hand. I did, and helped him free himself of the garment. After I had done so, he looked up at me, flushed, from under his thick brows and his curtain of long black hair.

It was an attractive look on him.

“Let’s try something else,” he said.

Estraven leaned closer and pressed his forehead to mine. I thought for a moment he thought it might help with mindspeech, but his thoughts were nowhere near telepathy.

I think it was he who kissed first. We slept very little that night and woke up with our limbs tangled together, but by that time he was in somer, and we continued as usual. 

I tried mindspeech with Estraven again during Nimmer, but we made no attempt during the great snowstorm that snowed us in for several days. That storm had managed to coincide with Estraven’s kemmer, and he had no intention of abstinence this month, not anymore. We spent five or six days in blissful physical communion, resting comfortably, making love, sleeping, holding each other close, having long, pleasant conversations, kissing, laughing, and making love again.

Estraven spent much of the day after kemmer quite quietly, mostly sleeping, staring at the ceiling, writing his diary, looking blankly into the distance. His silence was beginning to worry me, because he had been quite talkative the previous days. I asked him whether he was worried about something.

“Perhaps,” he said, and didn’t elaborate.

The next day, while out hauling the sledge, we did what we usually did around midday, and stopped and cut ourselves a small wall of ice to eat our lunch in lee of.

“If I get sick,” he began.

“Are you feeling sick?” I asked.

“No. Let me finish.”

His description of what might happen to him involved blood, which horrified and perplexed me. Scurvy? But not scurvy, since orsh and gichy-michy had plenty of ascorbic acid. Something else? He mentioned the alternative possibility of hunger and fatigue. I did not understand.

“If you get sick, I’ll put you on the sledge and haul you,” I said, “I know you’d do the same for me.”

“I don’t think I’d get  _ that _ sick,” Estraven said. “I may not get sick at all… I am only telling you so that you are not surprised if I do.”

“Right,” I said, still terribly in the dark.

“I wish I’d brought more rations,” Estraven lamented. “I brought more than I thought we’d need, but this is going to take more days than I had accounted for.”

“It’s all right,” I said, though I too certainly wished he had brought more rations. 

And onward we hauled. 


	2. Kurkurast-Genly's narration

When we arrived at Kurkurast, we were in a sorry, half-starved state. I remember passing out, or at least the moment before passing out. Estraven managed to invoke the hospitality of the Domain first, and ask the people who opened the door for us to look after me, and then the strength went out of him. He sat down slowly on the floor and folded forwards into sleep. After that, I must have joined him in unconsciousness, because my next recollection was waking up in a hard but warm bed of furs. 

The last few days on the ice we had been living off melted water, forward momentum, and sheer will; it was borrowed energy. Now we were safe, and we could rest. Though we were among strangers, we were among strangers who met us with generosity and kindness. Kurkurast was not a rich Domain, nor a large one. It was a poor land that nourished few people. There were no Domain-lords in Kurkurast, but no paupers either, and we would not be paupers among them. They gave us food and hospitality to the extent that they could, welcoming us like long-lost hearthmates.

No questions were asked of us at first, as was the custom, and no business was discussed while we ate. I remember our first dinner at Kurkurast. I don’t remember what we ate, only that it was hot food and that I was grateful that it was neither kadik porridge nor gichy-michy. Estraven sat across from me at one of the long common tables of the Hearth’s dinner hall. A few minutes into the meal, he grew terribly still. His eyes were closed, his breath was slow and shallow, and he gripped the edge of the table so tightly, the ends of his fingers paled. I said something to him, but he did not answer. Instead, he winced, muttered _damn_ , got up to turn from the table, and was sick down the front of his clothes. I got up at once, worried. A young mother who had been seated next to Estraven got up too, passed the baby he had been feeding to someone else, and held out his hand to my partner.

“Are you all right?” he asked Estraven.

“Yes, thank you,” whispered Estraven. “Only queasy. It’s been a while since I’ve eaten properly, you see.”

“I think I do see,” the young mother answered. “May I get you some clean clothes?”

I offered to help but, feeling quite useless, asked the fellow to tell me what to do. I had nothing to give to Estraven, only my concern.

“Lighter fare is easier to keep down,” the young mother informed me, though he gave me a strange look because I had openly asked for advice. “The cook still has dried fruit left over from autumn.”

So I had a job to do, to track down the cook and get Estraven something easier to digest. We reconvened in the bedroom our hosts had lent us, and I turned out my pockets onto Estraven’s bed. The cook had given me four dried breadapples sliced into spirals, a thermos of lukewarm water, and a tiny wooden drinkhammer in case the water’s surface started to freeze. Estraven ate and drank slowly, cautiously. He was reclining on his bed with his shoulders propped up on both of our pillows, shirtless and in a pair of fur trousers given to him by our new ally, the young mother, who happened to be the youngest son in the flesh of this year’s annual chief of Kurkurast. 

Estraven did not look well. Neither of us did, but our hard journey had lost him the softness and roundedness so typical of Gethenian frames, so that the trousers he wore were a perfect fit heightwise but gapped pitifully around the waist. His eyes were closed, and he looked weary, all color drained from his cheeks.

“You said on the ice you might get ill,” I said. I omitted what he had said about perhaps starting to bleed because I didn’t understand it and it frightened me. “Is this what you meant?”

Estraven shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“I meant something else. This will pass,” he said softly. “We must worry about getting to Sassinoth first. That’s where we’ll find the closest transmitter.”

My heart sank at that. Sassinoth was southwest, close to the border, another hundred and fifty miles to travel. I had at no point expected it to be easy, but as the journey unfolded in front of me, I saw that it did not end. First to Sassinoth and then to god knew where, depending on how the king of Karhide reacted to my ship. So much was uncertain. And Estraven, where would he go? I thought of him trudging back to Orgoreyn alone again as he had last spring, and felt a pang of horror.

He must have sensed my distress but misunderstood it, and said,

“We won’t be _walking_ all the way to Sassinoth, my dear. I’ve talked to our young friend about routes. We may catch a lift on a roadpacker or a powersledge. And then you’ll probably want to continue south, to Ehrenrang.”

“I’ll make Argaven revoke your banishment,” I said suddenly, forcefully.

“Make him, Genly?”

“I will,” I insisted. “I’ll set it as a condition. Karhide won’t come into the Ekumen till it’s revoked. We’ll get you home.”

Estraven was quiet for a little.

“That’s your love talking,” he said, “not your diplomacy. I do appreciate it. But I’ve lived twenty years already as an exile from Estre. A little banishment from Karhide, I can handle. I’ll take care of myself. You take care of the Ekumen.”

“I know,” I said, “but not just the Ekumen. You too. I mean it.”

He smiled thinly.

“Well, it’s still too soon to be sure of anything. We can make plans once your ship lands. if I’m in Orgoreyn by then… As long as I’m still proscribed, it’s a crime to speak to me, but I should be able to send word to you through someone else.”

“If you’re in Orgoreyn, and can’t come back,” I said, “I’ll go there.”

Once more, Estraven was quiet for the span of a few long breaths. 

“Genly,” he said at last. “We often talk at cross-purposes, and misunderstand each other. Do you mean you would stay here, on Gethen?”

“Yes.”

“And never return to your world?” Estraven asked, surprised.

I nodded, solemn. 

“No, of course not,” he said. “I should have thought of that. You told me about time dilation. There is no one left on Terra you would know.”

How could he not know how much I loved him?

“Even if I had a hundred mothers and fathers still living, Therem, I would remain here. With you.”

For a third time, he made no answer. In the weak light of the window, I saw him wipe his eyes. I got up and knelt by the side of his bed.

“Therem?”

“That’s a heavy thing to say to a man,” he said, shakily. “It’s heavy as a vow.”

“I don’t know much about how people make vows to each other here,” I said, “but I _know_ it’s a heavy thing to say, and I say it in its full weight. I want to stay with you, if you’ll have me.”

In the dark, he met my eyes.

“I will,” he affirmed. “Of course I will.”

He moved back the blankets from his bed to invite me in, and held on to me tightly when I joined him, cradling my head against his chest.

The beds in the room our hosts had given us were narrow for two people, otherwise we would have shared one as we had shared our sleeping bags zipped together as one. I didn’t think we’d be able to sleep comfortably all night in the same bed, but I did want to be close to him for a while, and was reluctant to leave his arms. When he was asleep, I crept back into my bed.

We did not set off for Sassinoth at once. For another two days, we stayed in that little fishing village of Kurkurast. It was small, as I have said, and a place of hard living, on the very edge of the edge of habitability. It was a place that forced its dwellers to rely on each other’s honesty, and Estraven knew our honesty was required too. Gradually our hosts began to ask, indirectly, with regard to shifgrethor, why somebody might decide to spend a winter strolling the glacier. 

“Silence is not what I should choose, yet it suits me better than a lie,” Estraven answered.

He was much recovered by that night, and looked more himself. The food had helped. Our young friend, who had decided that Estraven was as much his responsibility as his own little child was, scarcely let us out of his sight, and hung out quietly in the hot-shop with us. Much of the domain was connected by underground tunnels, so that one needn’t set foot outdoors much during the worst of winter. It felt like one massive, sprawling anthouse.

“It’s well known that honorable people come to be outlawed, yet their shadow does not shrink,” said the hot-shop cook, who ranked next to the village chief in consequence, and whose shop was a sort of living-room for the whole Domain in winter.

“One person may be outlawed in Karhide, another in Orgoreyn,” said Estraven.

“True; and one by his clan, another by the king of Ehrenrang.”

“The king shortens no man’s shadow, though he may try,” remarked Estraven, and the cook looked satisfied. A clan-exile would have been suspect, but the king’s strictures were unimportant here. I recalled Estraven’s proverb about Karhide. No king had yet managed to truly rule it. As for me, evidently a foreigner and so the one outlawed by Orgoreyn, that was if anything to my credit, and we had passed inspection without endangering our hosts with our names. 

“Nor does one’s clan,” our friend piped up. 

“Well, you might be right,” the cook said, a bit thrown off, “but no one comes to be outlawed by his clan without shortening his own shadow first, through spilling blood or spilling water between blood, both of which are heavy things.”

“Not equally heavy,” the younger one said gently. “Surely it’s not the same to take life as to make it.”

“Herror,” said the cook warningly, for that was the person’s name, “I waive. Are you accusing the guest—?”

“Of course not, no,” Herror said meekly.

“Then it’s strange talk,” the cook said with distaste.

“We’re not strangers to strange talk,” I quipped, “we’ve just been in Orgoreyn.”

The pun worked better in Karhidish, where the words strange and foreign were only a letter off from each other.

“I’ll tell you how we got out of Orgoreyn,” Estraven said, and launched into an account of his rescue of me from the prison farm, and the strange tension passed.

Herror followed us to our room afterwards, apologizing wretchedly.

“I should not have drawn attention to you like that,” he said to Estraven. “I only meant to let you know that I know, and that you are safe here.”

He was a candid person with the awkwardness of youth; in his twenties but not by very much. 

“And what is it that you say you know?” Estraven asked, patient.

“Well, I don’t know for sure,” Herror said, “and I don’t want to pry. A person is entitled to his secrets. I don’t know if you _have_ spilled water, but if it’s true…”

Herror paused, looking for a reaction from Estraven. He gave none, stone-faced, so Herror continued, emboldened.

“If you have, your clan was cruel to cast you out in winter,” he said fiercely, loyally. “The punishment does not fit the crime. They ought to have waited, or sent the other person away instead. It’s good you have a friend with you, but it was not fair the journey should be _yours_.”

Estraven sighed. Herror interpreted the sigh to fit his thoughts. He placed a hand gingerly on Estraven’s arm and said some well-meaning words of consolation for his loss of Hearth and brother.

“Thank you,” said Estraven, in a strained, wavering voice. He paused for a long moment before continuing. “But I’m from Kerm Land, Herror. That’s almost the other pole. That’s where my clan lives. I have not arrived in your house freshly cast out of mine. I have told the truth in this place. I came here from Orgoreyn across the icecap. Your assumptions are out of place.” He did not add, _and out of line_ , but his tone conveyed that too.

Herror put his face in his hands, and was silent. In the carrier on Herror’s back, little Mivired made his best approximation of speech to fill the silence. Since he was less than a year old, it consisted of cheerful, meaningless syllables.

“This is embarrassing,” muttered Herror. “I did assume. I’m sorry I—”

“Nusuth,” Estraven said, without much sincerity.

“I’m a fool,” Herror lamented. “Nothing happens here. No one ever comes here and the first person that comes here, I accuse of spilling water.”

“But like you said, not as bad as spilling blood,” said Estraven, not brusquely but not particularly warm.

“No, I suppose not,” said Herror mirthlessly. “I am so sorry.”

The young fellow saw himself out of the room.

I had begun to understand something that night, but I wasn’t sure what. We were side by side in separate beds, and our room was lit only by the fire at our feet and by weak moonlight from the vertical slit windows to my back. It was late, and we had already wished each other good night, but my thoughts were whirring, so I spoke across that dark gulf, ruining the silence.

“The ‘spilling water between blood’ talk… that’s about the prohibition on brothers having children, isn’t it? And the water in the metaphor is the… that liquid when a person’s pregnant, that stuff that the, you know, that it all floats in?”

I didn’t know the word for amniotic fluid in Karhidish. It hadn’t ever come up. I didn’t at the time know the word in my native language either. I had not studied anatomy, nor did I know much about babies.

Estraven lay with his back turned to me, striped by the faint light from the window slits. He did not move or answer for so long that I thought he must be asleep. When he spoke, it startled me. 

“It is,” he said.

Siblings keeping kemmer was not forbidden on Gethen, but if they conceived, they had to part ways and one of them, either the getter or the bearer, would leave home. Herror’s assumption was bizarre in ordinary circumstances. Why assume that any given unknown traveller was cast out of Hearth and law for conceiving with a sibling? But in one circumstance, the assumption was more plausible, albeit still extreme.

“Therem,” I said, “does Herror think you’re pregnant?”

“It seems he does. It also seems...I’d tell you if I was certain,” he said after a pause. I had always heard him speak as someone who knew exactly what he was going to say. He spoke haltingly now, in a nervous way I had never heard him use before. 

“I don’t know if it is possible, us being aliens,” he continued. “But it’s more than halfway through Anner and I haven’t been in kemmer yet, and it’s not because we’ve been eating poorly, because I’m still stuck in the shape I took with you in Nimmer. Herror saw me by mistake when I was changing into the clothes he gave me. Being stuck in this shape without being in kemmer usually means one thing. What it might mean if not that, I can’t say. I’m sure I haven’t suddenly become a halfdea— a permanent. Not at my age. But, if I am carrying something, and I think I am, I don’t know if it will stay. It is half of this world and half not. There is much still uncertain. I worried it might come loose while we were hauling several hard miles a day and eating terrible rations. When I nearly fell into that blue crevasse—”

He flinched a bit, as if recalling the vertigo.

“I was afraid I had gotten hurt, and it might have—it might have come loose and might make me start bleeding.”

“You told me that, too,” I said distantly. “I remember.” 

I was still stunned. I had accepted that my friend, my love, was and was not a man, and was and was not a woman, but I had believed that our bodies were too different for anything but mutual enjoyment to come of our union. Estraven had believed the same. We had been perfectly wrong.

“I should have told you everything,” Estraven said.

“Yes, you should have told me,” I answered, not angry but perplexed. “Why didn’t you? You wanted me to tell you when I was sick. What happened, Therem?”

He turned then to look at me, eyes dark, piercing, and direct.

“Fear,” he admitted. “My own. And I didn’t want to add to yours, not till you got to Sassinoth. So I had to bear the knowledge alone, for a while.”

My mind turned to an ancient anecdote of earth history, perhaps apocryphal, of the Laconian youth who hid a fox under his cloak and let it bite him to death rather than cry out.

“You _are_ pregnant, then.”

“Probably,” he said, hesitating. Then, after a pause he added, “No, certainly. Yes, I am. A month and a half.”

“Oh my god,” I said, for I could think little else.

“This doesn’t change the plans,” he insisted. “We’re still headed to the transmitter, and then I’ll get back to Orgoreyn. The rest, I will figure out afterwards.”

“But...will you...will you be all right, in Orgoreyn, alone?”

“I managed for the better part of last year,” Estraven said. “Though...I’d rather stay in Karhide.”

He sounded so yearning and so wounded when he said it, that he’d rather stay in Karhide, in his home country that he so loved and that had rejected him.

“We can figure things out together, for now,” I said. I did not know what that meant. I had nothing to offer him but empty hands. But I wanted him to know that I was with him, that I wanted to help with whatever he needed to do, that my loyalty to him was absolute.

“Thank you, Genly,” he said.

We left for Sassinoth the following morning. We meant to say goodbye to foolish, generous young Herror after breakfast, but he was either too embarrassed to come out, or was sleeping in. A friend of his agreed to pass on my farewell and Estraven’s thanks for the new clothes.


	3. Between Kurkurast and Sassionth - Estraven's diary

_ Sordny Irrem.  _

It would have taken eight or nine days to Sassinoth in regular circumstances, but we made the journey slower than I had planned. It looks like it will take us a whole week: thirteen days between Kurkurast and Sassinoth. I had not guessed how ill the roadpackers and the powersledges and every kind of moving vehicle and even simple walking and skiing would make me. It’s infuriating. I have never been carsick or seasick in my life, and now I have the most loathsome, stupid nausea and can only stand to travel a few hours a day. I tried to stay up late nights so that I would be forced to sleep while in transit, and not suffer so much, but the only effect it had was to make me tired as a surplus to my sickness. My stomach tries to empty itself at the slightest provocation. More fool it, since there is so little to empty. 

Eating is difficult. I can manage some bread in small chunks, or a couple spoonfuls of the most insipid kadik porridge, or water in small sips throughout the day, but not much more. My head hurts often. My chest hurts sometimes. My heart runs fast. My mind fogs and my patience is gone. 

Since we are traveling slowly, I have the time to write. I would write more, but I am weary and in ill humors.

Genly is patient, and insists we should not push ourselves to travel too fast. By “we,” he plainly means me. I remind myself people in his culture are not offended by advice. He says it out of concern, after all.

At times I fear I may lose control over the tight coil of frustration I hold within myself. At other times I feel I lack enough energy to truly snap.

My voice comes out of my throat and I scarcely recognize it. Riding on the back of a roadpacker a few miles outside Sassinoth, I tell Genly,

“I didn’t get nausea last time,” and I sound pitiful, like I’m about to cry. 

I close my eyes and do not cry, because the windows of the packer are down so I can get fresh air but it’s so cold, and snot freezing to my face is another thing I don’t need.

Next to me on the bench, he puts his arms around me and I rest my head on his shoulder.

“You’ve done this before, then?” he asks.

I nod.

“I guess I didn’t think...but I should have. Foreth rem ir Osborth did say to tell you the children were well. I didn’t realize…”

“No, they’re both Ashe’s. He bore them. I’m only the father.”

I do not say,  _ these days, I have been missing them as though they were my own.  _

“My child—my son, I should say; He’s not a child, he’ll be twenty come spring. He lives in Estre.”

I do not wish to turn my thoughts towards my Hearth and son, but lately, I cannot help thinking of Sorve. I don’t know what he looks like now, as a young adult, so in all my recent dreams he has been a baby at my breast, or smaller still and hidden within me. In my dreams, I do not know whether I am nineteen again or forty. It is an appalling state, to be unhitched from time, and to have your wounds unstitched. My mind does not dare do this to me while I am awake, and so waits till I am asleep and guardless, like a coward. Genly does not ask about my Hearth and family. The subject is a difficult one for me to speak of. I think he knows this, but I am certain he does not know why. There is much I have not told him.

“We can stop at the next stop and get off the road packer,” he says, (with an endearing space in the middle as if it were two words; he speaks Karhidish well but it is not his native tongue), “if you’re feeling bad.”

I answer the same thing I’ve answered every time for the past few days.

“It’s not practical to stop whenever I feel bad. I’m only feeling bad because we’re moving forward. We must push through a little longer.”

This was the opposite of what I had told him when he had a panic attack on the all-white unshadow of the glacier. I had stopped then, and pitched the tent. I do not follow my own advice now. I am desperate to be done with vehicles and to have his ship’s landing secured. 

“All right,” he says, hesitantly. “You know your limits.”

But in the afternoon, perhaps to spare my pride, Genly claims he needs to stretch his legs and eat, so we stop in the tiny Hearth of Pinth by the roadside, where we spend the night. I manage to eat a watery cup of bean and fish skin soup. It stays eaten, praise creation unfinished.

It is a mercy, I suppose, that if I had to get ill, I got ill now and not while we were crossing the ice. It is altogether too easy to imagine that if we had slowed our journey, we would have died. I will not dwell on that. We are but a day or two from Sassinoth at our current pace. I expect to be there by Netherhad Irrem.  ~~ Afterwards, ~~

I cannot bring myself to keep writing about plans and the future. At Rotherer fastness, as a youth, I was taught to live with uncertainty, even to love it. It is as necessary for life as water and like water, an excess will stop your heart and froth your lungs. My only gift, foresight, wanes again. I do not know what comes next.

I tell Genly that I will return to Orgoreyn and that the Orgota have no quarrel with me, but this is only partly true, and only true if I can pass my forged papers off as legitimate and if I can disguise my Karhidish accent. (I can do a passable Sekeve District accent by doing an impression of Obsle, dear old coward, though I can’t keep it up for long periods of time.) They have no quarrel with the invented fur trapper Thener Benth. But even then, he did desert his post at Pulefen Voluntary. He may find himself in some trouble. Therem Harth, on the other hand, is no friend of the Sarf’s.  _ He _ will find himself in considerably more trouble if discovered. 

I  _ must _ think of something. But it does not follow that I  _ will _ . I have become like a hunted animal. All I can think to do is hide. 


	4. Sassinoth - Genly's narration

We came to Sassinoth at last. A town of several thousand, perched up on hills above the frozen Ey: roofs white, walls gray, hills spotted black with forest and rock outcropping, fields and river white; across the river the disputed Sinoth Valley, all white. . . . 

We came there all but empty-handed. Most of what remained of our travel-equipment we had given away to various kindly hosts, and by now we had nothing but the Chabe stove, our skis, and the clothes we wore. Thus unburdened we made our way, asking directions a couple of times, not into the town but to an outlying farm. It was a meager farm, not part of a Domain but a single-farm under the Sinoth Valley Administration. When Estraven was a young secretary in that Administration he had been a friend of the owner, and in fact had bought this farm for him, a year or two ago, when he was helping people resettle east of the Ey in hopes of obviating dispute over the ownership of the Sinoth Valley. The farmer himself opened his door to us, a stocky soft-spoken man of about Estraven’s age. His name was Thessicher. 

Estraven had come through this region with his hood pulled up and forward to hide his face. He feared recognition, here. He hardly needed to; it took a keen eye to recognize him as a thin weatherworn refugee. Thessicher kept staring at him covertly, unable to believe that he was who he said he was.

And I for my part, kept staring at Thessicher. By this time, I was no longer doing the mental process of imagining every person I met as a man, then as a woman, and then trying to overlay the two images like in a stereoscope. Instead, the stereoscope pictures I made in my mind were of everyone we met first as a danger, then as a friend. I lived afraid of harm coming to Estraven. 

Estraven had impressed on me the risk of recognition. He had done so quite forcefully. The days between Kurkurast and Sassinoth were the hardest part of our journey, harder still than the Gobrin Ice. He had insisted, with all the force he could muster while sitting with his head between his knees in sweats and shivers, that the closer we got to Sassinoth, the higher the risk was that he would be recognized, and that therefore the closer we got to Sassinoth, the quicker we had to travel. I heeded him as best I could, because my life was in his hands, and because I loved him and did not want to insult him, but I also slowed down as much as I thought was safe, because he looked like his life was draining slowly out of him every time we set foot in a moving vehicle.

I thought to myself more than once, I have killed him. I have killed my beloved Therem, my only friend Therem. Not by relying on his help on my mission, which he had made his mission as well, but by becoming his lover. But he would have hated to hear me say that aloud, so I kept the horrible thought to myself.

Thessicher also became concerned for him. He took us in, once his alarm had passed. His hospitality was up to standard though his means were small and his winter stores were running low. He was anxious. It was understandable; he risked the confiscation of his property by allowing us to stay with him. But he owed that property to Estraven, without whose help he would have likely been as destitute as we were. It seemed fair to ask him to take the risk. 

Estraven asked his help, however, not as a matter of repayment but as a matter of friendship, counting not on Thessicher’s obligation but his affection. And Thessicher’s fear thawed once the two of them got to talking, and to reminiscing by the fire about old days and old acquaintances. But while Thessicher was loud, lively, and demonstrative, Estraven was weary and subdued, and Thessicher took note of that.

“What the devil did they do to you in Orgoreyn? Put you through one of their work camps?” he exclaimed. 

“It’s him they did that to,” Estraven answered, gesturing towards me. “I only got him out.”

“He looks like he’s having a better time of it,” Thessicher answered, clucking his tongue.

I did not tell him what the matter with Estraven was, because Estraven had not brought it up. He didn’t talk about it. I did not want to betray his trust.

“Yes, he is,” Estraven answered, and didn’t elaborate. Thessicher did not press.

“Well, it would be an awful thing to go back to Orgoreyn,” Thessicher declared.

Cautiously, Estraven asked if he had any idea of a hiding place, a deserted farm or something like that where a banished man might lie low for a couple of months in hope of the revocation of his exile. At once, Thessicher answered,

“Stay with me.”

Estraven’s eyes lit up at that, but he demurred. It was not safe so close to town, Thessicher agreed, and he promised to find him a hideout still further out. A cousin of his lived a few miles south, he said, and Estraven might be able to take on a false name and find work around there as a cook or a farmhand, though he said “farmhand” with some delay, likely because Estraven was not looking much up to heavy outdoor work.

Thessicher had already had his own dinner, but he offered to make us spiced scrambled pesthry eggs. He had a reserve of them in his larder, preserved from last year’s foraging unshelled and frozen in cube trays. Estraven refused politely and urged him not to trouble himself. He could cook up some kadik rice on his own.

“What, plain?” said Thessicher. “Ah, got used to Orgota cooking, didn’t you?”

Estraven said nothing, and smiled mildly at his joke. 

I offered to cook instead, but Estraven wouldn’t let me, so I got to talking with Thessicher instead and fielded the usual questions one gets when one is an immigrant from another world. Mercifully, he was not interested in alien physical differences, and did not fixate on my dark skin as Argaven did. Thessicher was a farmer, and liked being one, and was good at it. He was curious about what farming looked like on worlds where the ground was not frozen most of the year. Wasn’t it too hot for the plants? And were there really animals that you could domesticate? What kept them from simply laying down and dying in captivity, like all normal creatures did?

“Except fish, of course,” he added judiciously. “You can breed fish.”

I didn’t have all the answers but knew enough about other worlds to make conversation. After a few minutes, we went to check on Estraven. We found him sitting in a chair by the stove. He got up for a moment to stir the pot and then sat back down immediately, a little short of breath. 

“Harth,” Thessicher said gently, “a man can’t stand up to stir a pot, something’s wrong with him.”

“True. Tired and hungry are the names of my afflictions,” Estraven answered.

“No, tired and hungry are the names of your friend’s afflictions. You’ve left your coat and gloves on indoors, and you look like death. What have you got, anemia?”

Estraven looked pensive for a long while.

“That’s possible,” he said.

I was greatly relieved. Ill with something treatable was a far better state than dying.

“Let me make you a warm bath,” Thessicher said. “Won’t fix anything, but you’ll feel better.” 

Estraven agreed to it, and Thessicher got down an enamelled galvanized tub from a peg on the wall and dragged it in front of the hearthfire. Then, following his lead, I helped him fill up big stock pots with water and set them on the stove to heat. Estraven had moved his chair from the stove to give us space and ate his kadik slowly while we worked.

For a while, the only thing to do was wait for the water to warm, so I sat in a different chair by the fire. It was soft enough and I was weary enough that I fell asleep without noticing. The next I saw was a damp Estraven, wrapped in a towel, with considerably more color in his cheeks. He was nudging me awake. The fire had also grown lower, and Thessicher sat silently, staring directly at it, perturbed. He didn’t look at us once. 

“Come, Genly, let’s go to bed,” Estraven said, and took my hand.

As we lay together under the thick fur blankets, I felt a strong mental connection. I could sense his mind, warm and drowsy, slipping off to sleep and nearly mindspoke him at once, but held back. There would be time to figure out mindspeech later. Let him rest, Genly, I thought.

Early in the morning while Estraven was still sleeping, I left for town on skis, with the Chabe stove in hand. We had discussed the plan beforehand, so I knew what to do. I sold the stove, the last thing of value we had, at the Town Commerce, then took the solid sum of money it had fetched up the hill to the little College of the Trades, where the radio station was housed, and bought ten minutes of “private transmission to private reception.”

My ten minutes were to be early in the Third Hour, late afternoon. It would not be worthwhile to make the trip to Thessicher’s and back, so I hung around Sassinoth and got a large, good, cheap lunch at one of the hot-shops there. Karhidish cooking was better than Orgota, no doubt. As I ate, I remembered Estraven’s comment on that in the tent, when I asked him if he hated Orgoreyn; I remembered his voice that night in Kurkurast, saying with all mildness, “I’d rather stay in Karhide.” I wondered what love of country was, and how it comes to be, for I had never felt it for any of my homes, and wondered how such a pure thing as my friend’s love of his country could be, in other people, so easily perverted into hatred of the other. What made it go wrong?

Mostly, I sat in the hot-shop missing Estraven. It felt unnatural not to be at his side, like I was naked in front of all these people going about their lives; like I was missing a hand or an eye. It was not just because I loved him and worried about him. I think I would have felt this way also if I hadn’t been in love with him, or worried for him. I had not yet come altogether out of our solitude on the ice.

People were strange to me. They walked up and down the lively streets of the town, going into shops, markets, businesses. I walked around the town too, after lunch, despite the snow flurries and the freezing temperatures, trying to feel like a person in the world again. In the afternoon, I climbed back up the steep snow-packed hill to the Trades College, and was admitted and shown how to operate the public-use transmitter. When the time came, I sent the  _ wake  _ signal to the relay satellite, which was in stationary orbit 300 miles over South Karhide. It in turn would send the signal to the ship, but was not equipped to send a response to me, so there was nothing I could do but send the message. I could not know if I had done right to send it. I had come to accept such uncertainties with a quiet heart.

It was snowing hard and growing dark when I came out, and it would have been easy and sensible to find an inn or any hospitable place and stay in town overnight, but I wanted to get back to Thessicher’s farm as soon as possible. I sped back home on my skis in the gloaming.

There was a closed sledgecar, a vehicle sort of like a small car with snowmobile legs, parked outside Thessicher’s house. I did not recognize it. There was official-looking writing down the side, which I could not make out in the dark and at a distance, and it chilled me with fear.

The lights were on, but I could not approach the house from the front, so I crept around the side. Through a vertical slit window, I saw Estraven sitting by a fire, sipping something hot from a ceramic cup. He looked well and seemed unperturbed. There was no one else in that room. I rapped on the window to get his attention, and rapped again harder, because the storm outside had picked up and was blowing loudly. He startled, though without spilling his drink, and relaxed when he saw me. Rising to his feet, he came across the room, and opened the window a crack.

“What’s up?” Estraven asked.

Urgently, I warned him about the powersledge parked outside. He gave a  _ hmmph _ of displeasure in agreement, but showed no sign of alarm, and let me into the house through a side door.

“I thought it was the king’s guards, or...I don’t know,” I confessed breathlessly, while Estraven helped me out of my heavy outer coat. “Maybe something worse, if there is something worse. I was terrified. I thought maybe it turned out Thessicher wasn’t trustworthy.”

“Oh, he’s not,” Estraven said, quite drily. “But he’s merely stupid, not treacherous. The doctor already gave him an earful for it. Very vindicating to listen to. They’re in the dining-room if you want to eavesdrop, but I’m afraid they’re not arguing anymore.”

“Sorry,” I said, “ _ what?” _

“It’s all right,” he said. “Our luck has bettered.” 

He explained the gist of it to me, and then offered to introduce me to the doctor.


	5. Sassinoth - Estraven's diary

_ Orny Irrem _ . 

Told Thessicher everything last night out of desperation. I saw no recourse but to court his pity and conscience; it worked.

He was filling the tub and telling me that I ought to be careful, that Tibe had a price on my head. I brought my chair a little closer to where he worked and listened. The sum he named was seventeen hundred and fifty  _ sarregy,  _ and my first thought was to be insulted. I should have fetched more. Tibe had access to the royal reserves, and this was a stingy figure from the palace administration, as grand as it was for an individual recipient. My second thought was unease that Thessicher could list the figure so quickly, though I didn’t think he would trade me for personal gain. But when he mentioned that there was a fine of just as much for assisting me, in addition to the confiscation of property, the unease turned to fear. Seventeen hundred and fifty sarregy is enough for one person to live, not particularly well but at least without fear of starvation, for eight months. To lose as much money in one swoop would destroy a man, property confiscation or no. 

We were both afraid of each other, then. It was not a tolerable situation.

“That’s an unjust punishment,” I said haltingly.

“It  _ is,”  _ Thessicher agreed. “Tibe is quite vindictive.”

I told him my situation, then, slyly. I did not tell a lie, but I felt an unpleasant shade of doubleness in my voice when I expressed some note of worry for myself and “the baby,” as if not trying to draw attention to it, as if I assumed that Thessicher already knew I was pregnant, as if I were not telling him quite deliberately while laying my hands over my still-flat middle. It was the first time I had called it a baby, even to myself. I had not been in the habit of thinking more than a couple weeks into the future for a while now, and so many concerns pressed on my mind that I could not devote much time to a single one. I could not conceive of deciding for or against bearing him, or what either path would look like. Even if Genly’s mission went right, even if my proscription were lifted, what would come after? A dreadful thing, to live with no future in mind. I sounded dreadful too, like someone pitifully cornered on a sheer mountainside, pathless, ropeless.

“Meshe, Harth!” Thessicher muttered. He was not Yomeshta, but it was a pretty good exclamation nonetheless. “You’re—really? I can’t imagine breaking into prison and crossing a glacier while pregnant. Meshe’s tits! Not at our age. You and I must be made of different stuff! Perhaps you do have at least one ally in Orgoreyn, then,” he added. 

I shook my head.

“I can’t imagine you’re so friendless,” Thessicher said, “unless maybe, if some kemmerhouse acquaintance, and only in passing...”

I shook my head again, and Thessicher peered at me, puzzled, waiting for me to explain.

“I didn’t get pregnant in Orgoreyn,” I said. “It was while crossing the glacier.”

Thessicher looked at me and then at Genly asleep in his chair by the fire.

“No… _ Him?” _ said Thessicher. “With an alien? Would it work?”

“As it turns out, yes.”

“But surely,” Thessicher insisted, “surely…”

He had some confusion about how people of other worlds reproduced. The radio broadcasts about the envoy, before they had been stopped and dismissed as fabrications by the palace last spring, had described people of other worlds as comparable to but not precisely like half-sex Gethenians, “perverts,” in that they were permanents; and comparable to but not precisely like animals, in that they were permanents without being sterile, except they were people. But no animal in our world save man gives live birth, save some few marine mammals, so Thessicher had become convinced, despite my assurances to the contrary, that I was in danger of shredding myself from within with eggshell shards, or if it did not work like that, then some other gruesome incompatibility. He insisted it only stood to reason. I assured him it was unlikely. 

“But how can you  _ know?”  _ he kept saying. “I mean, how can you really know?”

He would not budge from this conviction, so I simply gave up, stripped, and got into the now-ready bath. The warm water did me good, and it was a relief to have a real wash, a proper wash, instead of wiping down with a towel in a tent.

Thessicher made no further conversation that night, and stayed lost in his own thoughts. I woke Genly and took him to bed, and fell asleep almost as soon as I lay down. He was already in town when I awoke, and since for the first time in a while I had a real bed and nowhere else to be, I went back to sleep. I thought that morning I might sleep only a few minutes more, but did not wake up till well into the afternoon, to the creak of the bedroom door opening. 

A young voice I did not recognize spoke. Confusion struck, then utter panic, then the desperate need to hide (impossible, in this room), then an unexpected stillness and calmness as I resigned myself to my death, and then confusion again.

“This isn’t your cousin Resh Ossihar,” the voice said.

“No, of course it’s not,” said Thessicher, “I said it was Sorhad Ossihar.”

“It’s not him either,” the voice continued. “Do you want to continue listing cousins? Because I’ve met Resh and Sorhad. Resh moved east to avoid gambling debts, and Sorhad has a teaching post down in Passerer.”

“Either could have been in town to visit,” Thessicher protested.

“Yes, but I’ve met them and I know what they look like, is my point. I don’t know all your cousins, but I know this person is not your cousin. You could have picked a cousin who doesn’t owe me money. Sorry to wake you, dear guest, by the way,” he added to me.

My startled heart was still thumping hard when I addressed the newcomer. I asked him who he was, and he asked me who I was, and we stayed at an impasse till I said,

“Well, I’m not Renid Thessicher’s cousin, and never asked to be.”

The visitor softened a bit.

“I’m Oderith Kusme ner Sinoth,” he said, entrusting me his entire name, perhaps in the hopes that I would entrust him mine. I would not. “I’m a physician.”

“And you’re here for...?”

“He’s not here for  _ me,” _ Thessicher said.

Though Thessicher had been presumptuous in calling a doctor for me, I could still recognize I needed one. Without giving him identifying details about myself, I told Dr. Kusme that I suspected I was malnourished and that my problems were likely malnutrition compounded with being in the first quarter of pregnancy. He agreed it was likely, ran some portable tests, took some samples for less portable tests, and wrote down some recommendations for foods and vitamins. He also gave me the remaining half of a bottle of an anti-nausea drug that he carried in his purse—his personal one, not his doctor’s bag. I took a capful of it and soon felt slightly more normal. 

Once I was in better humors, I decided I liked him. Kusme’s manner was simple, uninvasive. He did not pry. He did not presume.

“There are screenings people generally do, if they’re having babies,” Kusme said. “You might want to come into town to the hospital in a week or two. And if you’re pregnant but not having a baby, you might still come into town for someone to write you a recette for expulsion meds.”

I told him I could not come into town under any circumstance, and that I could not tell him why. He was not pleased with my caginess, but was prepared to accept it, until Thessicher quipped that  _ he _ would get his child looked at if  _ he _ were having an alien child. I hoped that Kusme would not catch that, or that he would think Thessicher was joking or crazy. But Kusme stilled, glanced at me, and glared at Thessicher reproachfully.

“Not that you’re wrong, but a man puts his life in your hands, he expects you not to have eely fingers,” Kusme said.

“I don’t have eely fingers,” Thessicher snapped.

“No?” Kusme asked. “If it had not been me, if someone else had come, Thessicher... Well! What do you think, Lord Estraven?”

It chilled me, but I made no reply, no reaction to the sound of my landname, and played the fool. So did Thessicher.

“What, the old King’s Ear?” Thessicher said, laughing convincingly. “At my farm? That’s a joke. Didn’t he die?”

“Did he?” I asked.

“I’m positive I heard something about it on the radio last Tuwa.”

Kusme seemed unamused.

“Has the envoy got very many other friends who need to hide from the public, do you think?” he asked. “Have a whole lot of proscribed friends, did he?”

“Don’t know! I’ll ask him if I meet him,” my brash host answered.

Kusme said nothing to him, but addressed me instead. 

“I never considered you a traitor,” he said earnestly. “Many of us here do not. You did what was necessary to stop the fighting in the valley. It was a noble thing, and the king did not understand it. He thought himself insulted when his people were kept safe from harm. Many of us here would defend you, myself included.”

His words moved me, but I could not bring myself to acknowledge that I was who he said I was, nor could I bring myself to deny it. Kusme was not so rude as to force the subject, content to accept my non-denial as an admission of my identity. We discussed other matters, conversing pleasantly for a couple hours. Thessicher joined us at the table too, with three mugs of hot juice brewed with beer-spices and sweetbeet.

Kusme was good company. He had nowhere else to be today, it turned out, for work was slow, so he could stay a little while longer. The busiest month for him was usually at the start of spring, he told us, when allergies flared up and ice got weak and slippery. He discussed his work as a general practitioner in broad terms and never spoke about any patients in particular, which struck me as trustworthy. He asked, with genuine interest, how I had crossed the Gobrin in winter, and by the time I finished talking, a snowstorm had picked up outside. I thought that because of the poor weather, Genly might stay in town till tomorrow morning. Kusme could not drive back in such low visibility, and he was stranded at the farm with us. He was embarrassed to be imposing on Thessicher’s hospitality and offered to cook for him at his own place sometime.

A sudden wave of tiredness overtook me while they chatted and I felt I could no longer be sociable and converse with people, so I withdrew to the fireside in another room. 

There by the fireside I was sitting when Genly found me and started rapping at the window. He was in a state of considerable alarm about the doctor’s parked sledgecar. Once he came in from the storm, I tried to put him at ease. I told him the doctor was an ally and offered to introduce him.

Genly still looked shaken once he had calmed down.

“Let me warm myself first,” he said.

After he had gotten warm and collected by the fire, I led him on my arm to the other room. Kusme rose to his feet upon seeing Genly and looked up at him with reverence. The doctor was, like me, a short person, and his eyes came to about the height of Genly’s collarbone.

“Genly,” I said, “This is Doctor Kusme.”

“Lord Envoy,” Kusme said solemnly. “It is a pleasure to meet a visitor from another world.”

“Ai will do, Doctor,” Genly said. “But the pleasure is mine, that we should meet a man of medicine in our time of need.”

Kusme’s chest puffed up at that.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments welcome! I will update sporadically.


End file.
